In the Time of Greenbloom

by Gabriel Fielding

  His scarlet face, pinker than a huntsman’s jacket, looked almost indecent against the diffuse pastels and pallors of the room. He had been talking to a platter-faced girl of about seventeen who for some reason was wearing Jodhpurs. She looked bored in an uneasy way, as though she had no right to be bored, and kept glancing for approval in the direction of the Merryweathers. John thought at once that she must be their daughter and that she had been brought there to stay because of the title and at the same time equipped with very little else save Jodhpurs and the necessity for fresh gratitude to her parents.

  When Lady Geraldine spoke and confirmed all of his surmise, a summary so rapid that until she spoke he did not realise that he had thought it, he knew the first moment of satisfaction he had been granted that day. It always pleased him when he proved to be right about things which he could not possibly have known.

  “Now Sambo!” she said. “Here they are at last! I want you to introduce everyone to everyone while I go and see Wildbrown about the coffee and drinks in the Dining Room—Oh, and this Ursula dear is John Blaydon and his brother Michael and Mr Greenbloom and Mr Boscawen. Ursula’s staying here with her parents the Merryweathers,” she waved over to them intimately and they both smiled with pleasure. “Ursula adores houses and horses and I’m arranging for her to finish near Paris at Boufflémont, aren’t I Ursula dear?”

  “Yes, Lady Geraldine.”

  “And now I really must go. Poor Wildbrown is such a tyrant that I can never think of getting rid of her. Sambo! Perhaps you could organise ping-pong in the Billiard Room unless they’d rather dance to the gramophone or just talk. It’s too dark for croquet but everyone is to do just what they want.” She turned to Michael. “If only your little Mother would come over more often! She’s so wonderful at organising things, she’d have everyone acting in a play within ten minutes of her arrival; I know she would. But it’s sweet of her to spare you, especially in the Summer when she has so many things to do. Now you’ll find things to eat and drink downstairs and don’t forget to go anywhere you like but please remember about the—Barge.”

  With a last radiant, intimate, smile for them all no less than for Sambo she turned and left them gracefully with the same perfect composure with which she had greeted them; and at her going, the lights seemed perceptibly to dim the room to grow a trifle smaller and Sambo a little older, all the girls a little younger.

  The Rustle of Spring winnowed out into the air again carrying with it the ineffable tedium of a school Music Room, the two girls on the sofa resumed their chess, the Merryweathers their Tatler and Sambo his stiff upright redness in front of the looking glass.

  Beside John Greenbloom murmured, “Mon Dieu!” and said to Sambo, “I believe you are interested in football?”

  Sambo touched his moustache and without moving his lips eyebrows or any part of his scarlet face said:

  “Ruggah.”

  There was silence between them, only saved from proving unpleasant by the activity of the girl at the piano. Under the safe cover of the music John turned and inspected Ursula. Obviously she was the reason for his invitation. Her parents would live contentedly on the title and the address for a full fortnight; but for her, this would be very short commons. There were, he knew, no horses at Porth Newydd and this girl was quite obviously horse-mad. He wondered briefly why it was that girls who were fond of horses were always so brightly and separately put together, so hostile. Other girls, the horseless variety, had a softness about their features, one saw them as a whole; but girls like this were always lacking in homogeneity. They had fierce blue eyes, aggressively red cheeks, and harsh golden hair; they grew up to be women like Kay, Toad’s wife at the Abbey. He wondered dully and with increasing depression if she were still alive.

  “You live in Birmingham?”

  “No. Outside it.”

  “Have you just arrived?”

  “We’ve been here three days.”

  “It’s a beautiful place, isn’t it?”

  “It’s very cut off.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is—” What did she mean, he wondered.

  “What from? I mean what’s it cut off from?”

  Out of her square post-adolescent face she looked at him with hostility tinged with scorn.

  “It’s cut off, that’s all.”

  “Oh.”

  “If you don’t mind, I think my parents want me.”

  “Not at all.”

  He did not look over to them as she left him. He was not interested in knowing whether she were lying or not; she was the sort of girl he loathed and he felt suddenly furiously angry with Lady Geraldine for tricking him into his earlier excitement. What an appalling evening it was going to be. To eat of course there would be Miss Wildbrown’s cucumber sandwiches, to drink her watered cider-cup with the cucumber-peel floating on the top.

  The thought of this cheered him up; Greenbloom and Mick would be expecting a share of the whisky reserved for Sambo and the Admiral; but they would not get it. At the correct moment Sambo who was the only one in old Clive’s confidence, sharing not only his board but, if the Welsh rumour were correct, his wife’s most secret affections as well, would disappear into a concealed sanctum in the East Wing and leave them to the girls and their fate. There they would sit muttering in a study with scarlet wall-paper, furnished with naval bric-a-brac, drinking heavily, silently, and with the precious hostility which in fifteen years had become essential to their relationship.

  But Mick, Greenbloom and Boscawen-Jones would be depending on the prospect of potent refreshment to lift the evening out of the chasm into which it had fallen. They had been so very sure of it that they had only stopped for a very ‘short one’ at the Rhosybol Arms on the drive over, and John who alone had known of the increasing severity of Miss Wildbrown’s reign at Port Newydd, had not bothered to warn them of the austerity they must expect. When they did make the discovery they would leave promptly, he knew that; because the pubs in Wales closed at ten and already it must be nearly nine-thirty. So it would be a very short evening, and tomorrow, he remembered, was Sunday.

  He began to attend to the conversation in front of the fireplace.

  The Merryweathers less Ursula, who was now standing by the piano, had reintroduced themselves and moved in, while Greenbloom, who was showing signs of being worn down by Sambo’s capacity for silence, was addressing them on the subject of Jane’s poetry.

  “Impeccably middle-class, my dear Mr Merryweather,” he was saying. “That is why I am publishing him. Whether we like it or not we are moving away from the private revolution of Yeats Eliot and Pound into the era of middle-class art. We are moving back into all that this house stands for, Victorian revivalism, Manchesterism—”

  “What about Birm-ing-ham?” asked Mr Merryweather truculently, pronouncing each syllable separately.

  “That too,” said Greenbloom airily. “But Birminghamism with a difference. Birmingham today wants to feel that it has one foot in Windsor. It is no longer content, as it was in the days of Queen Victoria, to flaunt its own standards of wealth and aestheticism in the face of the aristocracy and be laughed at for its pains. Birmingham wants its own poetry, its own art forms, and it wants them to be both chic and smart. I am going to see that it gets them—through people like Jane here. He is the perfect type—as I said before—impeccably middle-class.” He paused. “Where were you at school Jane? I forget, Beowulf’s or Epsom?”

  “Ardingly,” said Boscawen-Jones.

  “Exactly!” said Greenbloom. “You see? He was at Ardingly. That is important. Whats-his-name was at Ardingly, that novelist fellow, but far from stopping him it has equipped him for the necessary social theft. Everything he writes is in the aristocratic tradition. In his biography he talks about his private school and his tutor as though he had been at Eton. Eton my friends! when everything about him is middle-class from his books and his antecedents to his outlook. Yet, that is why they sell, in prose he gives Birmingham the authentic Windsorism which Jane
will give it in Poetry. Fifteen years from now the middle class will have created an artistic revolution in England. It will have become the arbiter of taste; the mandarins will disappear and titled men of letters be reduced to writing books of biography and travel.”

  “What’s all this got to do with Poetry?” asked Mr Merryweather.

  Greenbloom yawned. “Oh nothing, my dear fellow, nothing at all. I was merely talking. One must make a noise sometimes.”

  Sambo spoke: “Rhk-ah! come for a drink? There’s something downstairs I believe.”

  Without waiting for a reply he moved off in the direction of the stairs and with great readiness Michael Greenbloom and Boscawen-Jones together with the Merryweathers followed him. John heard their consternation when they reached the landing and found that Sambo had disappeared; he heard them move off talking desultorily as they went slowly down the wide staircase.

  In a few moments Ursula and the other girls also got up and followed them out of the room and John was left alone with the girl at the piano.

  “Aren’t you coming down?” he asked.

  She stopped playing.

  “No, I’m waiting for someone.”

  “Oh I see.”

  “Can you tell me the time please?”

  He glanced over at the stopped clock on the chimney-piece. “I’m not sure, I think it must be about twenty to ten.”

  “Heavens! Is it really?”

  He walked over to her. “Who are you waiting for?”

  “Uprichard.”

  “Who is he?”

  She smiled.

  “It’s not a ‘he’, it’s a ‘she’. She only arrived this evening and I think she must be unpacking.”

  “Is she from the School too—from Wycombe Abbey?”

  “Yes.” She turned over a page of the music. “We broke up early because of an epidemic.”

  “That was lucky. What was it, Measles or Chicken-pox or something?”

  “Good Gracious, no. We’ve all had that years ago. It was”—she looked embarrassed—“gastric-something-or-other.”

  “Oh.” He changed the subject.

  “How do you spell Eweprichard?”

  “Up-Richard, it’s Irish.”

  She was very reserved he thought. He tried the question direct.

  “Are you Irish?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see, and this Uprichard girl is your special friend is she?”

  She looked irritated by his persistence. Her eyebrows contracted briefly behind her spectacles.

  “Yes,” she said shortly, “but not because we’re Irish. As a matter of fact she’s a Protestant.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No. I’m a Catholic.”

  “A Roman Catholic?”

  “Yes. In Ireland everyone’s either a Protestant or a Catholic.”

  “Really! Why’s that?”

  “Because it’s a Catholic country,” she said.

  He laughed. “That sounds awfully clever.”

  “It’s not—it’s just true.”

  She started to play again. He thought at first it was a gambit, something she might have picked up from the films; to sprinkle a conversation with music whilst swaying slightly on a piano stool. But after a few moments during which he cast round for something else to say or for some sign of her continuing interest in him, he noticed that she had become absorbed in the music and realised that her slight frown as she stared at the open sheet was directed against him and the persistence of his presence.

  Deciding that he did not like Irish Catholics he stepped away from the piano and followed the others down the stairs. At the bottom he turned along the corridor leading to the Aviary and the Orangery and went out through the glass doors into the garden.

  A warm moon, newly risen, illumined the pale slope of the lawn falling gently to the shrubs surrounding the Lake. He walked slowly towards them through the heavy dew, hearing the wet grass slip against his shoes as he drew nearer to the blocks of shadow underlying the bulk of the rhododendrons and azaleas.

  By this light the flowers with which they were solidly crowned gave back strange flames to the moon: they were indigo without blueness, scarlet with no vestige of red, whitenesses containing purple and black depths; and they leaped and burned without heat, seeming to vibrate against the darkness of their foliage so rapidly that no movement was apparent, yet so actively that he fancied they made the air immediately above their petals cold with the silent wind of their motion. He imagined that they were being kept there in the moonlight like dragon-flies, sustained hovering on wings beating so fast that they were scarcely visible. Their beauty, so remote, unrelated to anything but themselves, scentless motionless and all but unapparent when compared with their daylight selves, chilled him as he stood there watching them. He found then that he wanted to discover some means of declaring his presence, to affect them in a way which would force them to acknowledge him.

  In the house he had been rebuffed twice by his equals, by humans; and because of this he had come out here for companionship, seeking the inanimate intimacy of the night which in childhood had never eluded him; but now he found that he was shut out of this world too as completely as though he had had no existence. It went on in his presence as carelessly and uncaringly as it must have done in his absence, held together in darkness as in daylight by a force which took no account of his existence at all.

  He sniffed once again at the limp wallflower in his buttonhole. Either because he had been smoking or else because the air was saturated with dew he could smell no least trace of its earlier warm scent and throwing it away he reached up and started to wrench violently at one of the rhododendrons just above his head.

  Behind him, as he twisted at the stubborn stem from which a crown of petals rose, he heard a door open and close and the sound of footsteps crossing the gravel to the grass; but he did not hesitate. With a last twist he severed the blossom, tearing its bark back down to the main branch so that its bast was exposed whitely to the moon, and then stepped further into the shadows about him and looked back at the house.

  Greenbloom was limping across the grass towards him making for the same gap in the shrubs which he himself had observed a few moments earlier. In a great hurry, apparently quite unaffected by the leisureliness of the moon, he moved through the darkness of the grounds as impatiently and purposefully as he went through his days; his attention fixed on some immediate or anticipated act which was quite unsusceptible either to his humour or his environment.

  John stood quite still as he passed, not consciously hiding, but unable for the moment to declare himself unmistakably. He hoped that any initiative would come from Greenbloom, that he might stop and ask him what he was doing or confide in him the reason for his own sortie into the garden; but as it was, his state of half-hiding was not broken and Greenbloom, his small face pale as a wax mask, his feet making no sound on the trodden loam of the path, passed him as he went on towards the gleam of the water in the Admiral’s lake.

  John saw his body briefly silhouetted between the dark wings of the bushes before he turned to the left along the flagstones and disappeared in the direction of the boathouse. He wondered what he could be doing and how he had managed to evade Michael and Boscawen-Jones.

  Greenbloom described himself as being hyper-aesthetic and was openly scornful of purely Natural beauty. John remembered a story of Michael’s about a fortnight he had spent with him in Northern Italy and Rome. ‘Never again,’ Greenbloom had said on their return to his flat in Paris, ‘All that Beauty! So exhausting; and Rome, with peasants making their way on all fours up Somebody’s Steps and arriving at the top with Holy Water on the Knee; in future I shall confine my holidays to England and the delights of ribbon development!’

  Assuredly then it could not be the moonlight which had brought him out like this, though it might possibly have been a whiff of curiosity as a result of Lady Geraldine’s remarks about the Lake; probably he had wanted either to have a private drink
or else to evade the boredom of supper with the Merryweathers.

  John listened intently but could hear no sound from the direction of the pool, and so after a few minutes he began to steal quietly down the short path. At the far end he hesitated and then leaned out into the slow light of the moon.

  Greenbloom was sitting facing him on the innermost of the three long balustrades which at intervals of five or six feet encircled the oval lake.

  Behind him, the moon laid down a cold ladder of light on the surface of the water against which his head and shoulders were drawn black as a daguerreotype as he drank from the cap of the long flask he wore in his hip pocket.

  He wiped his lips carefully, stood the empty cap beside the flask on top of the balustrade, and without turning his head spoke aloud.

  “What have you done with it?”

  John stood galvanically upright in the shadows holding his breath, grateful for the fresh descent of the darkness on his eyes and face. Feeling absurdly frightened by his state of indecision he began to count secretly to himself, preferring to believe that he had imagined the words or else that Greenbloom was drunk rather than be reduced to acknowledging the fact that he had been observed spying and prying on someone else’s private moment. As he reached an unspoken count of ‘seven’ in his mind, Greenbloom’s voice grated out once again:

  “If you have it still I would like to see it. If not, it would be interesting to know why you picked it?”

  John stepped out onto the terrace.

  “I didn’t know anyone had seen me.” He heard himself laugh uneasily.

  “It is not pleasant to be observed,” said Greenbloom. “I do not like it myself and that is why I made no comment when I passed you.”

  “Oh.”

  “It is very unpleasant to be watched.”

  “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to watch you, Greenbloom. As a matter of fact I was bored and—”

  “Only bored?”

  “Yes—I think so.”